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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24387916">Nothing Lost That May Be Found</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_brisk/pseuds/little_brisk'>little_brisk</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Picard</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>AU where jean-luc picard did not abandon every one of his relationships, Gen, Romulan Culture, Romulans, château picard as the emotional processing bar at the end of the universe, fandom: women talking to each other, political trauma</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 02:33:59</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>8,883</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24387916</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_brisk/pseuds/little_brisk</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A summer party, a large group of friends, and the great divide of one unthinkable catastrophe.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kimara Cretak/Kira Nerys, Laris &amp; Guinan, Laris &amp; Kimara Cretak, Laris &amp; Kira Nerys, Laris &amp; her whole passel of Enterprise-D people</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>56</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Nothing Lost That May Be Found</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>With many thanks to @aubrys for readings that significantly improved this.</p><p><b>Content note</b>: very oblique references to past torture and incarceration; casual drinking.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><em>For whatsoever from one place doth fall<br/>
Is with the tide unto another brought:<br/>
For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.</em><br/>
— Edmund Spenser, <em>The Faerie Queene</em> V.ii.39</p>
<hr/><p>It had taken her some time, but Laris had grown used to the fact that a gathering of friends, for Jean-Luc Picard, generally resembled a summit of the most significant figures in Federation—indeed, galactic—politics and culture. In her first year on the vineyard, he’d invited ‘some old friends from his Academy days’ to stay a weekend, and they’d turned out to be the former President of Earth and her partners, the director of the Daystrom Institute and the great novelist of the Dominion War. ‘A colleague’ who came round for dinner was the Vulcan ambassador; a guest list of ‘a few interesting people’ was indistinguishable from a list of recent laureates of the highest prizes in astrophysics and the arts. So when the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war rolled around, with its summits and conferences and galas drawing people to Earth from all over the galaxy, it did not surprise her that he thought ‘it might be a nice time to have some friends round.’ The final guest list was sixty-odd names long, and filled not just the house but every inn and pension and hostel in the village.</p><p>Laris had grown used to it. And she had grown used, too, to retiring to the background of these parties, retreating to the role of housekeeper with its clear boundaries and demarcated responsibilities. Picard had used to try to cajole her into taking a more social part, but she’d reminded him often enough that if he wanted to invite everyone he’d ever met to stay, he needed a staff. There was an elegance to the work—half pure logistics (her strong suit) and half social engineering (her lifelong challenge)—that was like the elegance of mathematics, and she took the same satisfaction in doing it well. The bigger the party, the greater the puzzle. And if it happened to make an excellent hiding place, too, well, that was just an added advantage.</p><p>But for the first evening’s soirée, they’d engaged a real staff of professionals, caterers and drivers and the whole lot, and no matter how she tried to find excuses to stay busy, with all the blur and flurry taken off her hands, she had no recourse but to join the party. She hesitated now on the threshold of the terrace, watching the scene under the lights she’d worked all afternoon to hang just so, observing the patterns of social formations cohering around the gravity wells of important personages and tables laden down with food, and waited for the courage to leave the shelter of the doorway and make herself one of the crowd.</p><p>She felt conspicuous in formalwear, though her unadorned dark tunic and loose trousers probably looked unostentatious to human eyes—not to mention Betazoid, Bajoran, or El-Aurian ones. She’d put on lipstick in a darkish shade and the thin gold chain that Picard had given her at the New Year, she’d bound her hair back with some extra care. And she’d enjoyed the effect in the mirror in her room—and also, admittedly, the effect on the small handful of people by whom she most liked to be seen. But that pleasure was short-lived, and now it all just made her feel like an inadvertent klaxon sounding in a library. She took a breath, put on a smile, and stepped into the fray.</p><p>Moving carefully among the bodies of the officers and artists, politicians and public intellectuals, she offered polite <em>Bonsoir</em>s to all and let herself be waylaid by none, and managed without disaster to join the one group that felt like her own. She let Will kiss her cheek, clasped hands with Geordi, and with not insignificant relief, positioned herself between Deanna and Beverly, feeling comfortably plainer by comparison with their bright colors and declarative expressiveness. Beverly squeezed her fingertips; Deanna nudged her shoulder with her own. As though they understood. They probably did. It had been more than ten years. They were her friends now. She plucked a gin gimlet from a passing tray, raised the glass with a bright ‘Sláinte!’, and set all her willpower to not knocking the whole thing back at once.</p><p>‘Oh!’ Beverly yelped suddenly, elbowing Laris with her usual disregard for subtlety. ‘Look, Nerys and Kimara.’ She waved them over with a bright grin, and Laris lost the battle with herself and gulped her gimlet down. Kira Nerys was enough of a presence on her own, but the woman beside her struck a note of apprehension so deep in Laris that it would have made her dizzy even without the aid of a sudden boozy buzz. Kimara Cretak was a woman of many reputations. As a Senator, she’d been known for combining ruthless absolutism with uncompromising integrity; in her fall from grace, she had been understood by some as the worst kind of traitor and by others as the only kind of loyalist. And in the work she’d done since her release from prison in the wake of the disaster, slowly organizing the scattered remnants of Rihan civilization into a new Republic, she had attained heroic stature in the Federation. For the wrong reasons, Laris thought, but her Rihan admirers, Laris among them, were if anything more ardent still. If the fledgling state survived, she’d surely be its head before too long, and coupled to the most powerful woman in the Bajoran sector—well, between them they commanded some significant attention. </p><p>Laris felt another sharp elbow in her ribs. ‘Would you calm down,’ Deanna teased her, sotto voce, with a mercilessly knowing grin.</p><p>Laris laughed. ‘Fine, but if you abandon me I’ll murder you in your sleep,’ she whispered back. Deanna raised her glass to that, and Laris took a deep breath and squared herself to face Cretak and Kira. They were just two women attending an evening party, Laris told herself. Guests in her home, friends of friends. </p><p>She hung back, watching as Kira was immediately embraced as an old friend by all the others, and Cretak with a politician’s balance of reserve and warmth made her greetings with more careful degrees of familiarity, in heavily accented but almost idiomatic English. Across the terrace, over the shoulders of her friends, Zhaban caught her eye and grinned and mimed a parody of a schoolgirlish swoon. The gesture she wanted to return to him was not one she could perform in distinguished company, but he knew well enough what her scowl intended, and laughed and signed <em>good luck</em>. When she returned her attention to the group, Cretak was standing right in front of her, wearing a polite smile, and the moment before Laris managed to get a ‘Good evening’ out of her constricted throat seemed to last about a century.</p><p>Conspicuously Rihan among this group, they were dressed almost identically, swathed in loose dark linens in cuts her human friends called ‘modest’. She wondered if Cretak too had found the exposed calves and backs and shoulders everywhere in Federation space as disorienting as she had, if she too still found it hard to take her shoes off among friends. Her hair was cropped the old-fashioned military way; it suited her, and made Laris self-conscious of her feral curls escaping from the nest of pins she’d bound them with. Cretak crossed her hands over her heart in greeting. So formal. Laris returned the gesture, made awkward by the glass in her hand.</p><p>‘An honor, Senator,’ she said, flushing furiously. </p><p>‘My pleasure,’ Cretak smiled. ‘And an unusual one, to find a compatriot on Earth.’ </p><p>‘Yes,’ Laris said, and swallowed hard, searching frantically for anything at all to say.</p><p>‘Have we met before?’ Cretak asked, looking intently at her, her smile fading. ‘I have the strongest feeling that I know your face from somewhere.’</p><p>‘Oh, no,’ Laris demurred, ‘I’m sure I’d remember.’ She sounded like a star-struck girl. But she would certainly remember. ‘I so admire the work you’ve been doing for the Republic,’ she babbled, wishing ardently to be swallowed by the floor. </p><p>But Cretak spared her. ‘Thank you,’ she said curtly. ‘Please excuse me, I’ve not yet said hello to our host.’ And she turned and walked away. Laris recoiled at the sudden change of tone, and at the heavy implication that she did not rate the rank of host, that she too was an outsider here, in her own home. Deanna must have seen it, too, or felt Laris react, or both, because she stepped closer to her, intercepted a question Kira had just turned away from Will to ask her, and blithely embarked the group on a new conversation. Laris was too blindsided to follow, instead watching Cretak wind her way across the terrace toward Picard, wondering how she could have erred so dramatically as to merit what could only have been a deliberate insult.</p><p>She found the answer later that evening, when she finally gave up, sent the girl tidying the kitchen home, and set to the work herself. She’d sought relief in the dark cool quiet of the kitchen, with only glints and murmurs of the party outside drifting in, but did not find it: Cretak followed close on her heels, on the thin pretense of refilling a water glass. Laris watched her warily as she stood in profile at the replicator, starkly striking in the dim light. The strange familiarity of her formed an ache beneath Laris’s breastbone, and she longed to find some way to break the silence. But Cretak beat her to it.</p><p>‘I was surprised,’ she said, glancing at her sidelong, ‘when Kira told me that Jean-Luc Picard was living with a pair of Rihan refugees.’ </p><p>Laris huffed a laugh. ‘You’re not the only one,’ she said. She’d heard some variation on that sentence about a thousand times in the past ten years. </p><p>‘But I didn’t think anything of it,’ Cretak went on, gesturing with her glass, ‘until I saw you up close this evening. And do you know what, I believe I do know you.’ Her tone, though light, suggested there was something quite specific, and not at all friendly, behind it. </p><p>‘I would find that surprising,’ Laris said just as lightly, pretending not to hear the second note.</p><p>‘Not personally,’ Cretak said. ‘But I believe I know your work.’ She moved to effectively corner Laris against the sink, while appearing to lean casually against the counter, sipping her water.</p><p>‘My work?’ Laris kept her tone light and her focus on the platter she was washing.</p><p>‘You needn’t pretend with me,’ Cretak said, as though it were a kind of intimacy she was inviting. ‘I know what you are.’</p><p>‘And what is that?’ Laris asked conversationally, though her heartrate rose a little as she began to see where this was going. </p><p>‘Oh, please don’t play stupid.’ Her fixed gaze was palpable; Laris could not bring herself to meet it. ‘It doesn’t become you, Avem.’</p><p>Laris's hands stilled. ‘That's not my name,’ she said, and resumed her work. Though of course it had been, once. How Cretak had come by it, she had no notion, nor why it was the one she chose to taunt her with.</p><p>‘Is it not?’ Cretak replied. </p><p>‘My name is Laris.’ She said it as much to remind herself as anything. The name her mother had given her. The name she’d chosen to live under and the one she intended to die under. ‘My only name.’</p><p>‘Now, perhaps,’ Cretak said archly. ‘But you once had many, I imagine.’</p><p>Laris smirked, a little relieved. Did she think it was some kind of insight, that an intelligence operative might have used a range of pseudonyms? Did she think she was being subtle? But, Laris thought, she should, perhaps, be more forgiving if this woman, specifically, was a little leery of—well, of what she was. It had been naïve of her to think—to hope—that it would not come up. ‘Listen, Kimara…’ she started to say.</p><p>‘I really don’t think this is a moment for taking liberties, Laris,’ Cretak interjected, laying a hissing emphasis on her name. ‘Do you?’</p><p>Laris froze, taken aback at her own presumption. She hadn’t realized how far the years in Picard’s casual household, where everyone was always on familiar terms with everyone else, had dulled her sense of distinction. ‘I’m sorry, Senator, I—’ she began, but Cretak cut her off again.</p><p>‘The Starfleet people call me that because they think it’s polite, but I was formally stripped of that title twenty years ago. By <em>your</em> people.’ If Laris hadn’t already known it, the strain in her voice would have made it plain enough that the Tal Shiar had done much worse to her than that.</p><p>But protesting that they were not ‘her people’ would not convince Cretak; she wasn’t really that convinced herself. ‘I know,’ she said instead.</p><p>‘You know.’ That arch, sardonic tone made Laris wish they could be talking about anything else; it made her want to like her. </p><p>‘Of course I know,’ she sighed. The downfall of Kimara Cretak had been interplanetary news. She knew the version that had been broadcast on the state channels, and she knew <em>her people</em> well enough to speculate her way to a likely approximation of the truth. From what she could tell, Cretak should have been at least as bitter toward Starfleet as she evidently was toward the Tal Shiar. But then it wasn’t Federation operatives who had done whatever had been done to her in her long years in prison. And there was absolutely nothing Laris could possibly say, in the face of that, that would be worth anything at all.</p><p>‘How long did you think you could go on here like this?’ Cretak asked, so casually that Laris missed, at first, the threat that lay just beneath it.</p><p>‘Well,’ she scoffed defensively, ‘I’ve been <em>going on here like this</em> for a good while now, actually, so—. Wait.’ She paused as it caught up with her, and turned to meet Cretak’s eye. ‘Do you think that they don’t <em>know</em>?’</p><p>It was Cretak’s turn to scoff. ‘You can’t possibly expect me to believe that Jean-Luc Picard is knowingly harboring operatives of the Tal Shiar.’ </p><p>‘Haboring—. You’re joking.’ She’d always thought that her and Zhaban’s cover was as thin as any other kind of polite pretense. Surely no one actually believed that the Rihans cohabiting with the Admiral of the evacuation were ordinary civilians he’d just happened to adopt along the way? Had she been wildly overestimating the faculty of reason in everyone she’d met for the past ten years? She couldn’t help but laugh.</p><p>Cretak just watched her, brows arched, waiting. There was something almost reassuring in the extraordinary obtuseness she was demonstrating—but there was also something to admire in a woman who, upon discovering a presumed active agent of the Tal Shiar under deep cover in the heart of the Federation, decided on her own authority to confront her, alone and unarmed, and betrayed no fear whatsoever. </p><p>‘All right.’ Laris gave up the pretense of the washing-up, dried her hands, and leaned back against the counter. ‘Look. Almost the first words I spoke to Jean-Luc Picard were an admission that Zhaban and I were Tal Shiar. That was a decade and more ago, and it was the end of our relationship with the organization. And the Empire, for that matter. We’re not spies, Cretak,’ she finished with a bitter laugh. ‘We’re traitors.’ </p><p>Cretak did balk at that. She of all people must understand what it felt like to say that word. But she did not give up: ‘And if I ask Picard myself?’</p><p>‘Please do!’ Laris exclaimed, too loudly. She took a breath. ‘He knows. Beverly knows, Deanna and Will know. Guinan, Geordi, Laren. Kira, probably, for that matter! It’s not a secret. On the contrary. It’s a matter of record.’ The memory came unbidden of the pleasant sunlit rooms in San Francisco where she had been debriefed—she couldn’t even call it an interrogation—by Starfleet Security in the weeks following her and Zhaban’s arrival on Earth. The comfortable quarters each of them had been assigned, the lovely views over the Bay. The <em>food</em>. A great wave of shame washed over her; she felt, suddenly, unworthy even to stand in the presence of Kimara Cretak.</p><p>‘He knows, does he?’ Cretak said, still full of sardonic disbelief. ‘Does he know what you did for them? Does he know about Project Rhizome?’ </p><p>Laris stared at her a moment. That was another odd choice for a threat. How Cretak knew she personally was involved, she couldn’t fathom; she wondered if Cretak knew just how involved. The operation, a massive data-mining endeavor that had led to the identification for recruitment of a large number of assets among influential Federation citizens, had never, that she knew, been compromised or declassified, but of course any Senator who had sat on the right committee at the time would know quite a lot about it. Perhaps she’d recognized Laris’s face from some project dossier. But then, perhaps it was only a good guess. In any case, on the long list of things that Laris had done for the organization that she herself would use as proof she did not deserve to set foot in this house, much less dwell here with these people, Rhizome ranked very low.</p><p>‘No,’ she said calmly. ‘He doesn’t know any operational details. I offered to tell him, tried to tell him, more than once, and he has always declined.’ She swallowed. It was all a matter of record. Starfleet had all of it on file. He could look, if he wanted to. He no longer had the clearance, but he had a lot of friends who did. And so did she. She woke some nights in a cold sweat fearing that any of them might read it all at any time. That they might learn all of that, and more. ‘I think,’ she said, less calm, ‘he knows what it would cost me.’ </p><p>‘What it would cost <em>you</em>?’ Cretak gave an astonished laugh. ‘What it would cost <em>you</em>.’ A number of those Federation assets had learned the hard way how the Tal Shiar responded to noncompliance. Perhaps, Laris thought, she should move Project Rhizome up the list.</p><p>‘Fine,’ she said, growing impatient with the series of oblique accusations. ‘Fine. That’s fair. But what about you?’ A bite came into her tone along with the rising acid taste at the back of her throat, and she made no effort to soften it. ‘Are you proud of the career you built at the cost of the lives of—how many people? How many, <em>Senator</em>, whose only crime was believing that the Empire should be ordered differently, that and being stupid enough to say it aloud? Do they all know all of that? Does Kira?’ </p><p>‘She does,’ Cretak said, flushing a deep, mortified olive. Laris had struck her mark. </p><p>‘And what does she think?’ That she saw no reason not to twist the knife was, Laris thought, perhaps a warning sign that she should heed.</p><p>‘I’ve atoned for those sins.’ Cretak’s voice had gone very, very cold.</p><p>‘Have you?’ Laris spat. But she couldn’t help hoping that she had, that she had found a way. That maybe there was a way. Maybe you could learn to live with it.</p><p>‘At least now I know what side I’m on,’ Cretak hedged. Maybe not. </p><p>‘And what side is that?’ </p><p>‘The Republic’s.’ Picard had described her as a patriot. It resounded in the way she said that word. ‘Yours, ostensibly,’ she added, but it didn’t sound like a concession. </p><p>‘Not just ostensibly,’ Laris sighed. ‘Cretak, we shouldn’t be…’ It was exhausting, suddenly. She was exhausted. The first conversation she’d had with anyone but Zhaban in her own language in—how long? Years. The first conversation she’d had in years with someone who knew what it meant to openly declare an allegiance like that. Someone who knew what names were. The first conversation with someone who might come anywhere close to understanding any of it at all, and they were at each other’s throats. She took a deep breath, looked up to meet Cretak’s eye, and did her best to modulate her voice. ‘I don’t know if you—out there, in the colonies, the settlements, I don’t know what you see, what it’s like out there, but from here it feels like…’ She looked down at her hands, as though they held the tattered remnant of a civilization. ‘There’s so little left. And we—.’ Her voice caught. She didn’t know how to ask this woman not to be her enemy. She opted for candor. ‘What was done to you should not have been done. You and so many others. And us, too, you know. We were… made, into what we were, Zhaban and I. And you. The Empire did this to us, Cretak. To all of us.’ She had never said it in such blunt terms before. ‘But we’re here, now,’ she pleaded inarticulately. ‘We’re—we’re here, now.’ It seemed so improbable. Sometimes, she couldn’t be sure that it was even real. How could they be here, when so much had been lost? </p><p>Cretak’s steely gaze seemed to falter, and the breath she drew to speak was cautious. But at that moment laughter drifted through the open door, followed by Beverly and Deanna and Picard and the dog, and they were swept together into that other world where all went on as though the apocalypse had never come. </p>
<hr/><p>Laris lay awake late into the night, looking up through the skylight above her bed, hearing Cretak’s voice: <em>I know what you are</em>. That makes one of us, she thought. Some nights, when sleep was hard to come by, she started to lose track of what was when, and where, and who she was meant to be to whom. Some nights she thought she could feel herself unspooling. And now with <em>I know what you are, I know what you are</em> repeating in her mind she felt it catching up with her. So she did what she always did: she rose and wrapped a robe around herself and made a full round of the house. </p><p>She looked in on Picard and found him snoring loudly; the dog looked up with a low curious growl when he heard her step. ‘Shhhh,’ she said softly, holding up a hand for ‘stay’, and he settled back down. Zhaban was snoring, too, in his big Terran bed. Like Number One, he stirred and raised his head, and like the dog, subsided again on command. She leaned in his doorway for a moment, watching him drift off again. The thing that ran between them, the deep unutterable thing that both woke him and then let him fall back to sleep simply because she was there, tethered her now as always not just to him but to herself. She breathed a little easier, and moved on down the corridor.</p><p>Beverly’s light was on, her door ajar. Laris knocked and poked her head into the room. Just to look at her, soft and lovely in the lamplight. To see the way she smiled when she saw her. And to indulge the feeling that if she just stood there long enough, she’d become the thing that Beverly saw when she looked at her. That maybe then, she would know what she was.</p><p>‘Spacelagged?’ she whispered. Beverly nodded, laying her padd in her lap and leaning back against the headboard. Smiling fondly at her. Laris smiled back. ‘Need anything?’ she offered, and Beverly laughed like she saw through her pretense, and shook her head. </p><p>‘Go back to bed,’ she scolded. </p><p>‘Yeah,’ Laris said, leaning in the doorway, lingering to bask in that unwithholding smile. ‘Try to get some sleep.’</p><p>‘All right,’ Beverly agreed with a mocking sort of deference. </p><p>‘Night,’ Laris said stupidly. It must be nearly four. </p><p>‘Night,’ Beverly laughed, and watched her duck back into the corridor and pull the door carefully to. She leaned against it for a moment, wondering what kept her from acting on the overwhelming impulse to just crawl right into that bed with her. And what kept Beverly from asking her to, for that matter; it was plain as day she felt it, too.</p><p>‘Coward,’ she sighed as the light under the door went out. But it had worked. She felt less unmoored, less like she did not know what she was, or like she could not face it. It did remake her, sometimes, they way they looked at her. Beverly, Picard, Deanna. Her friends. </p><p>She crept silently down the corridor. The other guest rooms were all closed up and dark, and the rest of the house seemed to be sleeping too. All her weapons were where they were meant to be, powered up to full. Her perimeter scan was quiet. She reached the kitchen without discovering any disturbance. She checked the time: 3:47 a.m. She sighed. She began preparing breakfast trays. </p><p>As she laid out jams and honeys, fruits and breads and butters, collected mugs and demitasses and glassware and flatware, she heard a step she didn’t recognize behind her. She reminded herself to breathe—one, two—before she turned. </p><p>‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,’ said Kira, approaching the island with a cautious smile. </p><p>‘Not to worry,’ Laris said, wondering what had given her away. ‘Get you something?’</p><p>‘Oh, I’d love a raktajino,’ Kira said, and her smile broke into a disarming grateful grin. She looked tired; the journey from Bajor was long, and she probably hadn’t slept much either. </p><p>‘Coming right up.’ Laris punched the hotkey on the replicator. ‘Anything to eat?’ </p><p>‘Not just yet, thanks.’ She really was astonishing to look at, her burnished-copper hair striped with white falling around her face, her bright attentive eyes. That outrageous smile. ‘Can I help you with that?’ she asked, eyeing the chaotic array of foodstuffs collecting on the island.</p><p>Laris gestured dismissively. ‘Not much to it.’ But then, she thought, maybe it was an offer of her company, too. ‘Well, if you want to put some coffee in those cafetières—yes, that big jar, two scoops each; and set out the teas, right next to—right. Thanks.’</p><p>Kira kept on taking her orders without complaint, and they worked companionably til a dozen trays were laid out on the counter, waiting for the fresh things Zhaban would make when he came down. This was his work, really, but he’d be glad to find it done. And she appreciated Kira’s easy presence, the practical efficiency of her movements. </p><p>‘Care for a bit of air?’ Laris found herself suggesting when they were done. ‘Dawn this time of year can really be…’ She cut herself off, feeling awkward and absurd. But Kira smiled that wild smile, so out of proportion but so plainly unforced, and followed her out to the terrace, where the pink and gold cacaphony of the summer sunrise was just getting under way.</p><p>‘Earth colors are so strange,’ Kira murmured as they sat down together, watching the light creep across the vines. </p><p>‘Too vivid, sometimes,’ Laris agreed. It would strike her sometimes, out of nowhere; most days, it felt so normal, she felt at so ease here most of the time, but then out of nowhere something like this sunrise would remind her that this world and she still did not fully understand each other.</p><p>‘But Bajor sometimes looks strange to me, now, too,’ said Kira. ‘I’m always surprised by how red Dahkur is, how many shades of red, when I’ve been on the station too long.’ The way she said it made it feel like some kind of offering. ‘What was sunrise like, where you’re from?’ she asked, so casually that the panic took a moment to catch up with Laris. She turned to face her with a defensive barb on her lips, but something about Kira’s manner said it wasn’t thoughtlessness that made her ask. </p><p>‘Muddy,’ she found herself saying, easing back into her chair. ‘I grew up in the Capital. They built it on a coastal swamp, for reasons passing understanding, and the sky was always sort of greenish in the mornings, something about the way the weather caught the ambient light…’ She trailed off. She couldn’t capture it; the dank smell of the air, the comforting damp against her skin. ‘It’s so arid here,’ she said. She’d been to Bangkok and to New Orleans, and she’d grown familiar with Europe’s cold, damp northern coasts, but nowhere she’d been on Earth had that specific flavor of mornings in the city. She felt her longing for it as a dryness in her throat that could not be slaked. She swallowed hard, wondering if she’d shared too much.</p><p>But Kira just smiled and said, ‘See, it’s too humid for me.’ They sat in silence for a moment, taking in the sunrise and their caffeine, til Kira looked at her sidelong and spoke: 'Are you really Tal Shiar?’</p><p>‘Feck’s sake,’ Laris breathed, feeling like she’d taken a photon torpedo to the gut. ‘Why didn’t I see that coming?’</p><p>‘Are you?’ Kira’s manner was as easy as it had been when she asked her to describe the rising of a star now dead, and it was just as plain she expected a straight answer.</p><p>‘Yes,’ Laris said, then: ‘No. Was. I was, and so was Zhaban, and it’s not a fucking secret.’ Kira raised an eyebrow. ‘Sorry.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Sorry. You caught me off guard.’ She didn’t want to explain how alarming that was in itself.</p><p>Kira dismissed the apology with a wave of her hand. ‘I just didn’t know.’ She could have checked. <em>She</em> had the clearance. Why hadn’t she? Was it a test? To see how Laris would answer her? ‘I wanted to say,’ she began, and waited til Laris met her eye. ‘Kimara…’ </p><p>‘Is right to be suspicious,’ Laris said quickly, looking away again. ‘She’s right. Not in this particular, not about us, but in principle she’s right.’ She sighed and looked back at Kira, and realized how deeply she meant what she was saying. ‘I’ve always thought these people were too trusting.’ </p><p>‘Me too,’ Kira said with a sly smile. ‘Starfleet types.’ She rolled her eyes; her smile spread. It was catching; Laris couldn’t help herself. </p><p>‘Yeah.’ A silence fell. Laris looked at Kira sidelong, wondering what underwrote her easy friendliness. There was a studied calm in the way she cradled her mug, held it to her nose. Her poise, her stoicism, were so clearly learned, so practiced. Laris wondered if someone who wasn’t programmed to notice those things would notice them in her. She was young, yet; fifty-odd, though she sometimes seemed a fair bit older. She must have been a child when she fought the Cardassians, and when she took her first post on Deep Space Nine. Laris watched her, trying to imagine that girl. Not so stoical, she thought. </p><p>‘<em>Tal rezh zha vot in tal shem crezh’nik</em>,’ Kira said suddenly, and Laris couldn’t disguise her startle this time. Kira laughed. ‘Kimara’s been teaching me.’ </p><p>‘Your accent is very good,’ Laris said, to cover for her reaction to the content of the sentence. </p><p>‘Well,’ Kira laughed, ‘she’s a very demanding teacher. But what I wanted to say about her, just now, made me think of it—<em>tal rezh</em>, I mean.’ </p><p>‘You know what that means?’ Her experience was that outsiders who quoted Petra Kahl as casually as Kira had—though seldom in such perfectly inflected Rihannsu—had no idea what they were really saying. And no Rihan she’d ever known would say those words so carelessly, and to a stranger at that. </p><p>‘I think so,’ Kira said. ‘As I understand it—please tell me, if I get this wrong, but as I understand it, <em>tal rezh</em> is… a loyalty beyond loyalty. Loyalty of the true self?’</p><p>‘Allegiance of the secret heart,’ Laris sneered, ‘is how it’s translated in your—well, <em>their</em> melodramas. But they put “secret” in front of everything.’ For that she got a laugh that she had not expected. But perhaps she should have.</p><p>‘Kimara complains about that, too.’ Her smile was so warm. ‘How would you translate it?’</p><p>‘Into English?’ Laris groaned. She had stumbled over this problem so many times. ‘They don’t have our concepts. <em>Secrecy</em>, <em>loyalty</em>. Everything is so blunt in English. But I suppose I don’t need to tell you that.’ </p><p>Kira laughed. ‘Don’t ask me how many years I wasted trying to discuss religion with Starfleet people before I realized that the translator was turning every nuance into the one word <em>faith</em>.’ </p><p>Laris found she was smiling again. She wondered if Kira had this effect on everyone, was always this able to make a person feel understood. ‘I hate that one too,’ she said. </p><p>‘<em>Blind</em> faith, they always say,’ Kira went on.</p><p>Laris rolled her eyes, and Kira laughed. It was hard to believe this conversation had begun as an interrogation. ‘<em>Tal rezh</em>, though,’ she said, more soberly, and Kira leaned back, listening. ‘Literally it’s just the loyalty—allegiance—attachment of the… spirit, heart, self, <em>whatever</em>, the … metaphysical self? It’s what you attach to before and beyond all other things. Conceptually, like. Ideologically? Ah, feck. I wouldn’t, is the point,’ she said finally, giving up. ‘Translate it.’ </p><p>‘I see.’ Kira laughed again. Like she understood.</p><p>‘You’d be careful how and where you talked about it, especially in the context you were quoting, if we were on the home—.’ She paused, took a breath. ‘On the homeworld. At the height of the Empire, it was a dangerous concept. It’s the counterpart of <em>tal shem</em>, which is simpler: I think that’s what humans mean when they say <em>loyalty</em>. Outward allegiance; declared devotion. Like to a spouse.’</p><p>‘Or a state,’ Kira added, as though she understood the connection.</p><p>Laris nodded. ‘The Imperial line was that the two should always be perfectly aligned, like a continuum leading from the innermost heart of every Rihan to the heart of the Empire. It’s when <em>tal rezh</em> begins to point in other directions that you run into trouble. But you know all of that, if you know what that sentence you quoted means, where it comes from.’ </p><p>‘The prison diaries of Petra Kahl,’ Kira said promptly.</p><p>‘You’ve read Petra?’ She didn't know why that was surprising. If outsiders knew any Rihan thinker, they knew Petra, or the replicator-magnet version of her, anyhow. </p><p>Kira nodded. ‘Many times. She’s one of those—I find myself returning to her, you know?’</p><p>‘… Yeah. I do. I—me, too.’ She sat back and looked at Kira, struck by how banal it seemed to be sitting here on a pleasant morning on Earth, talking about Petra like it wasn’t the blade’s edge of treason, with this stranger who so nonchalantly addressed herself to everything that Laris found unspeakable. She smiled an involuntary, incredulous smile, and Kira smiled back. She cleared her throat. ‘Did Cretak put you on to her?’ It was hard to imagine; the woman might be a patriot, but she was no radical. </p><p>‘No, actually,’ Kira said. ‘You’ve met Elim Garak, I think?’ Now there was an unlikely friendship.</p><p>‘Mm, a few times.’ She’d liked him enormously, right away—there was, she’d found, always a special understanding between retired operatives, but there was also his easy, flirtatious manner, the way he had of letting you know he understood things without ever making you look directly at them. And thinking of him, and looking at Kira, she thought: maybe not so unlikely, actually. ‘Beverly and Julian are close,’ she explained.</p><p>‘Of course. They worked together on Cardassia during Reconstruction, didn’t they? Anyway, he gave me a copy in Bajoran translation, just after the war. He was reading a lot of Romulan dissidents, then,’ Kira explained, with a sad smile. ‘He thought Cardassia had a lot to learn from them.’ She paused. ‘From you,’ she corrected. </p><p>‘Dissidents,’ Laris repeated. She couldn’t quite find the courage to disclaim that honorific, though she had not earned it, certainly not from the mouth of this woman. In any case, Cardassia had not learned. Nor had her own people. To their tremendous cost. ‘Well,’ she said, shaking off her sudden sorrow. ‘You should try her in Rihannsu. She’s a lot funnier, for one thing, than translations give her credit for. Anyway, she made <em>tal rezh</em> dangerous to say aloud, made it synonymous with dissent, but the concept is older, and simpler. It’s what orients you; what you commit to. A polestar, like. A purpose.’</p><p>Kira nodded and sat quietly a moment, as though absorbing it. ‘Well,’ she said eventually, ‘what I wanted to say, what made me think of Petra to begin with, is that Kimara thinks her <em>tal rezh</em> and yours are at odds.’ She looked Laris in the eye. ‘But I’m not so sure.’ </p><p>‘No,’ Laris agreed, wondering again what it was that Kira recognized in her. ‘But she has very good reasons for feeling as she does.’</p><p>‘Yes,’ Kira said, with the grace—and, perhaps, the experience—not to try to soften it. ‘But… give her time.’ An intensity of emotion came into her voice that took Laris by surprise. ‘I really think you could be friends. I really think she—I think it’d be good for her.’</p><p>‘I—. Yeah. It’d be good for me, too,’ Laris admitted before she could think better of it. She cleared her throat. ‘But we haven’t exactly gotten off to the best start.’</p><p>Kira laughed aloud. ‘Honey,’ she said to Laris’s quizzical look, ‘you are talking to the galaxy’s leading expert in getting off to a bad start with Kimara Cretak.’ </p><p>‘That sounds like a story I’d like to hear.’ Laris smiled and sat back as Kira laughed again, leaned close, and embarked upon her tale.</p><p>By the time Zhaban came down, they were entrenched in an amicable but voluble argument. Laris looked to him for backup, swatting his hip and saying, ‘Hey, what do you think is a reasonable armament for a field hospital in time of war?'</p><p>‘Ouf, I don't know,’ he said, squinting sleepily and rubbing the back of his neck. ‘My grasp on all that stuff is so out of date.’ But she could see him calculating in his head.</p><p>‘Early in the Dominion War, the Cardassian front,’ she said, as though it were an offhand example.</p><p>He sat beside her and stole a sip of her raktajino. ‘It would depend on the scale and location of the facility, but I'd say... somewhere between five and ten thousand plasma torpedoes, for a start?' </p><p>‘Hah!’ Laris cried, gesturing at his answer and raising her eyebrows at Kira, who spread her hands helplessly.</p><p>‘I don't know what's wrong with you people. We're talking about a <em>hospital</em>.’</p><p>‘Exactly,’ Zhaban said, like he didn't understand the problem. Replicating Laris's reaction precisely. He looked at Kira and then back at her, nonplussed. She shrugged, and laughed when Kira did.</p><p>‘You're not telling missile crisis stories over breakfast, Nerys,’ came the voice of Kimara Cretak from the direction of the house.</p><p>‘She is, I'm afraid,’ said Laris apologetically, suddenly intensely conscious that she was still wearing only her nightshirt and her light, thin robe. She tried inanely to hide her bare feet beneath her chair. Cretak met her eye, raising an ironical brow that she could not interpret.</p><p>‘They've taken your side,’ Kira complained, as Cretak came to stand behind her, laying her hands on her shoulders. </p><p>‘Of course they have,’ Cretak said, with a small smile. ‘It is the only reasonable position to take.’</p><p>Kira guffawed. ‘I’m surrounded by lunatics who think plasma torpedoes qualify as a healthcare provision!’</p><p>‘It's a <em>hospital</em>,’ they all three said in unison, and Cretak laughed like she was trying not to.</p><p>‘Breakfast!’ Laris declared, rising before any awkwardness could fall among them. ‘What can I bring you?’ She laid a firm hand on Zhaban’s shoulder when he tried to get up to help her, and beat a fast retreat into the safety of her role. But she carried that four-part harmony of laughter as a warmth in her chest that stayed with her all morning.</p>
<hr/><p>Once she had made sure that everyone was fed and sorted out with directions into town or toward the river or instructed how to make the fussy deck chairs recline, and the thousand other little needs of houseguests on holiday, she took the dog and walked far out into the upper field, and when she knew she was out of eyesight from the house, stretched out her arms and lifted her face to the hot June sun. She breathed in deeply the sharp, sappy vines in their riotous summer growth, the mineral earth so rich it sometimes gave her a deranged impulse to just eat it by the fistful, and the sweet clear silence on the breeze that let her know she was entirely alone.</p><p>But as she scanned around her for the dog, wondering whose carcass he’d be bringing back to her, her heart dropped at the sight of a solid orange shape, incongruous against the green, lying supine on the ground.</p><p>‘Guinan!’ she yelled, and jogged toward her, but Guinan raised an arm and waved.</p><p>She lay stretched out on the soil with her preposterous hat under her head for a pillow, so that her wild bright silver locs spread their havoc aross its disc, like an icon of some ancient sun god. For all her heavy layers in the blazing sun, she did not sweat nor seem to feel the heat at all. But when Laris’s shadow fell across her face, she opened her eyes. ‘Laris,’ she said, and Laris scowled at how pleased she was by the impression that Guinan was glad to see her. </p><p>‘What are you doing?’ she asked hotly, her alarm turning to baseless irritation.</p><p>‘Listening,’ Guinan smiled, like she knew just exactly how that answer would frustrate her.</p><p>‘To what?’ But she knew. She did it too. Not lying on the ground, maybe, but she knew what Guinan heard: first the breeze in the leaves, and then beneath it the water-sounds of the river, then birdsong, then the low buzz of insect life. The rumble of distant vehicles; the whine of a drone high overhead. The uncanny sense that under all of it, there was something very deep and very large holding it all together.</p><p>‘Life,’ Guinan said, and Laris appreciated that she didn’t think an explanation necessary. When Guinan called from space, she always wanted fine details from Laris about the ecological goings-on of the vineyard, updates on growth cycles and infestations, good fertilizers and bad weather. At first Laris had bristled at it, assuming it was Guinan’s way of manipulating her into admitting some connection to this planet, but eventually she learned that it was that and also a real desire to feel some connection of her own with the rhythms of a living world. </p><p>Laris sighed and sat down in the dirt beside her, resting her back against the fencepost. Number One followed her example, snuffling in the dirt til he was satisfied all the smells were where they should be, and promptly fell asleep.</p><p>‘How’re things between you and the Senator?’ Guinan asked suddenly, squinting up at her with that wry smile spreading on her face.</p><p>Laris snorted, shaking her head at herself. ‘You know, that’s twice today I’ve let something surprise me that shouldn’t have?’ </p><p>‘And it’s not even noon.’ Guinan chuckled, soft and low, closing her eyes and folding her hands under her head. ‘Still fraught?’</p><p>‘Down to yellow alert, I think,’ Laris said. She’d been spending too much time with these Starfleet people. ‘Optimistically.’ </p><p>Guinan didn’t say anything more. Laris closed her eyes, too, leaning back against the fencepost, and they were silent a long while together, amid the busy world-sounds all around them. Then her padd chimed its lunchtime alarm, and brought her back into the flow of time. She stood and offered Guinan her hand, and watched with some fascination as she disappeared her hair beneath her hat in a way that seemed to defy known properties of physics. They walked back together in the same companionable quiet, even Number One seeming to have caught the meditative mood.</p><p>‘You play pixt, don’t you?’ Guinan asked as they approached the house.</p><p>‘Of course,’ Laris said, wondering how to politely let Guinan know it would be a bad idea to challenge her. </p><p>‘So does she.’ Guinan gestured as though to an obvious conclusion.</p><p>‘She—? Ah. I see.’ Laris smirked. ‘I’m sure she does. But so does every other Rihan I’ve ever met.’ </p><p>‘At dinner last night, she made a point of saying she used to be ranked.’ </p><p>‘Did she?’ Laris paused. That <em>was</em> interesting. She wondered if she read the pixmit, too, or what she would think if Laris admitted that she did. She puzzled out the possibilities all the way back to the house. When they reached the front court, Guinan stopped and turned to face her.</p><p>‘Listen,’ she said, with her special emphasis on the word. ‘She’s from the Capital. She reads everything. She’s a creature of narrow habits and firm convictions, but she’ll try anything once. She has a subtle sense of humor, a defensive and conflicted love for her people, and a weakness for powerful women. Remind you of anyone?’</p><p>Laris acknowledged the point with a reluctant gesture. It was hard to see how any of that could matter, in the face of the one catastrophic divide between them.</p><p>Guinan laid a hand on her arm. ‘And,’ she said very slowly, ‘<em>she plays pixt</em>.’ </p><p>And with that, she glided into the house to wreak, presumably, whatever other mischief she could find, while Laris was left standing on her own doorstep feeling like a schoolgirl who’d been scolded at her lessons.</p>
<hr/><p>The times Laris loved best, and the reason she let Picard keep overestimating how much hospitality his Château could sustain, were these: the dispersal after dinner, when the day’s work wound down to quiet talk around the table, the intimate core group left at the end of an evening. The glint of candlelight on glass, the muted laughter of tired, satiated people. Banished by Will and Zhaban from the kitchen and the washing-up, and beckoned back by Beverly to the scene where she and Deanna were trying to re-enact some long-ago adventure for the benefit of Cretak and Kira, she stood leaning on Deanna’s chair, catching Kira’s infectious laugh and enjoying the way Beverly punctuated all her sentences by reaching absently to pat her arm, swat her hip, caress the back of her knee. She tried to avoid looking at Cretak, but when by chance their gazes snagged on one another, the expression she wore was one of quiet curiosity.</p><p>That group, too, dispersed eventually, and Laris was alone with the last of the glassware and the crumbs on the table. The quality of this quiet, too, brought her a kind of peace, a kind of perfect satisfaction in the last easy gestures that returned the room to a state of potential, emptied of all signs of one gathering and waiting for the next one. She was lingering to straighten candlesticks and placemats, set the chairs just so, wanting to prolong the feeling, when she felt another presence in the room.</p><p>‘Laris,’ Cretak called. It was the first time she had said her name as anything but an accusation. Laris looked up at her with a hesitating hope. ‘I owe you an apology,’ she said quite bluntly, and then, proffering a bottle shape wrapped in tissue, switched to Rihannsu: ‘From my house to yours,’ she said, and the gesture along with the old-fashioned saying so startled Laris that her eyes stung.</p><p>‘Oh,’ she said stupidly, accepting the bottle. She collected herself and chose the reply she thought best suited: ‘May our doors be ever open to you.’ If Cretak found that degree of candor surprising, the only indication of it was a blink and a small smirk. ‘Thank you,’ Laris said more plainly, looking down at the bottle in her hands. </p><p>‘I meant to give it to you when we arrived, but then…’ she gestured, looking for just a moment disarmingly uncertain. ‘Anyhow. It’s from a distillery out in the Mirnas sector; I had thought, when we received your invitation, that you and Zhaban might like something to remind you of home.’ There was a note of irony in the way she said it, but that somehow only made the sentiment seem more sincere.</p><p><em>Home</em>. Maybe, Laris thought, she and Kimara Cretak shared an understanding of that word. ‘Thank you,’ she said again. ‘But I don’t feel you owe me an apology. On the contrary, I—’ </p><p>‘Well,’ Cretak interrupted her. ‘If you like it, let me know. I’m in the sector often; I’ll send you a case.’ </p><p>‘I will. Thank you.’ They stood awkwardly, facing each other, on either side of an unbridgeable catastrophe. Laris drew a deep breath. Absent a bridge, all she could do was jump. ’On Earth,’ she ventured recklessly, an unpremeditated running leap, ‘when a—when a friend offers you a bottle, it’s customary to share it with them. Will you…?’</p><p>Cretak hesitated for a moment, then gave a polite nod. ‘I wouldn’t gainsay custom,’ she said, with that light ironic cast that Laris abruptly realized she found profoundly charming. </p><p>‘Good,’ Laris said, trying not to mind her flush. And then, as she took down some glasses, as though it were just casual: ‘I hear you play pixt.’ </p><p>Cretak smirked in much the way Laris had when Guinan had asked her about it. ‘I do,’ she said. </p><p>Laris fished her deck out of her pocket; she’d been carrying it around all day. ‘Well?’ she said, risking a smile. </p><p>‘Ah. You may regret this,’ Cretak said, in a light and comfortably arrogant tone that Laris thought must be close to her natural self. </p><p>‘I doubt that.’ It had been a long time since Laris had played a real round, but it had been a very, very long time since anyone had bested her. But here, she thought, was a woman she wouldn’t mind losing to. ‘Anyway,’ she quoted, on a whim, from one of Petra’s early pamphlets: ‘<em>Perfect security is inimical to life</em>.’</p><p>‘<em>…And to seek the enemy of life is to act as an agent of death</em>?’ Cretak supplied, arching an interested brow. ‘Serious words.’</p><p>‘It’s a serious game,’ Laris deadpanned. </p><p>Cretak smiled then what seemed a true smile: sharp, predatory, but inviting, too. ‘All right, then,’ she said, pulling out a chair and gesturing to the one opposite. </p><p>‘Good.’ Laris set the cards down on the table and then, with emphasis, the bottle. ‘Let’s play.’</p><p>Cretak dealt—guest’s prerogative—and Laris poured, and what she felt as she watched Cretak pause over her well-worn cards, appreciating the antique design, she could not hope to name. </p><p>The first card Cretak laid down was Min/Esh, the first letter of the Rihan alphabet and the last. The end, and the beginning. Laris smirked. A conventional, almost ritual opening for a game whose counterpart was divination. But it also seemed a kind of invitation. She watched her lay the cards out, sipped her kali-fal with a delicious, searing hiss, and made her own first gambit: ‘I was trying to explain to Kira this morning what morning smelled like in the Capital.’ </p><p>Cretak gave a low laugh. ‘That’s easy: like a swamp.’ But then she looked up, cradling the cards in her still hands, and said quietly: ‘I’d forgotten.’ </p><p>‘Me, too,’ said Laris, and a softness came into Cretak’s eyes that she had not seen before. She surveyed the pattern Cretak was slowly building on the table between them, raised a brow. ‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘this isn’t going to be an easy win.’ </p><p>Cretak only smiled. She laid the last card down: the World. With its five concentric circles, radiating light. Laris picked it up and held it in her hands. </p><p>‘Take your time,’ Cretak said a little tauntingly. She raised her glass. ‘And meanwhile, tell me what else you remember.’ </p><p>Laris moved the card to a new position across the table, chose two more to hold, and passed. ‘When I was small,’ she said, as Cretak made her choice, ‘we lived down by the docks…’</p><p>They played, and talked, and drank late into the night. Laris won a few rounds and lost several, and in the end they had to help each other up the stairs. But they were hindered as much by laughter as by alcohol, and as she fell into a deep and heavy sleep, Laris thought that in the morning there’d be more remembered between them than forgotten.</p><p>And in the kitchen, by the abandoned yellow glow of lamplight, two glasses and a two-thirds-empty bottle stood vigil over the last remnant of a final game, two cards side by side: Min/Esh, and the World. </p>
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